On the Saturday night after she returned from New York, Abby put on her prettiest dress, an ivory-colored maxi dress with puffy sleeves and a fitted bodice and a neckline cut low enough to give Mark a preview of coming attractions. He’d picked her up in an Uber and taken her to dinner at Morimoto （raw fish without rice, Abby realized, was one of the foods Mark could eat without worrying）。 After dinner, they’d stepped into the warm night and, without discussion, began walking toward Abby’s apartment. They didn’t talk about what would happen next. They didn’t need to. Mark held her hand, and Abby felt like his grasp was the only thing keeping her tethered to Earth. She was that happy.
Her bliss ended as soon as she’d unlocked the door. Even though she’d spent the afternoon cleaning （at least, the parts of the afternoon when she wasn’t removing hair from various parts of her body）， she knew her place looked untidy and undone, especially compared to Mark’s apartment, which was completely furnished and decorated in a manner suggesting good taste and competence. Mark’s place looked like a grown-up’s home, while Abby’s apartment looked like a room in a youth hostel, a way station for someone young who didn’t have much money or many things and wasn’t planning on staying for long.
“It’s kind of a mess,” Abby said, cringing, wishing she’d moved the pieces of the IKEA television stand she’d been trying to assemble for longer than she cared to remember into a closet. Mark looked around, inspecting her jumble of furniture and possessions. There was the dark blue velvet couch, her pride and joy, with an unframed poster of a Monet watercolor thumbtacked above it. A glass coffee table she’d inherited after Eileen and Gary the Businessman had redecorated stood in front of the sofa; a soft, fringed, pumpkin-colored throw, one of the few things she’d bought for herself as an adult, hung （unevenly, she saw） over its back. There were a pair of metal barstools standing in the kitchen, in front of the breakfast bar, but there was an empty space under the window where a table should have gone. On the windowsill, an orchid Lizzie had given her was clinging valiantly to life, despite Abby’s haphazard attentions. Waist-high stacks of books teetered against the walls, next to the recycling she’d meant to take out and the canned goods she’d been meaning to drop off at the mutual aid food pantry. Everything looked temporary, tenuous, thrown together, and barely thought through. It was not the home of a person who knew who she was, or how she wanted her living space to look.
Abby moved quickly to take Mark’s hand and convey him to the bedroom. She lit the candles she’d had at the ready, casting the room in a romantic glow （and, she hoped, disguising the piles of laundry on the floor, as well as the truly embarrassing number of self-help books on her nightstand）。 She pulled him down to the bed, and he’d kissed her, her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her shoulders, whispering that he didn’t know how he’d gotten so lucky.
It wasn’t the electric, immediate connection she’d felt with Sebastian. It wasn’t fast or frantic. It was slow and measured and thoughtful; good, but in a different way: the fulfillment of a promise their bodies had made long ago.
In bed, Mark was as gentle and considerate as he was everywhere else. “Are you ready?” he’d whispered, when both of them were naked, and he was hovering on top of her, his absurdly toned torso held aloft on his newly muscled arms, and Abby, laughing a little, said, “I’ve been ready since I was sixteen.”
Mark told her she was beautiful. He’d touched her gently, with something that felt like reverence. Abby tried to relax, to be in the moment, and not compare, for example, the way that Mark’s formerly soft, yielding body, the body that had made her feel so safe, was now taut and muscled, that every part that had once felt gentle and welcoming now bulged or rippled, stiff and firm. In the flickering candlelight, when he sat back on his heels to roll on a condom, he looked like a Greek sculpture, like Narcissus kneeling in front of the pond. When he was finally inside of her, he’d paid close attention, taking frequent looks at her face, asking if it was all right, if she wanted more or less pressure, if he was still in the right spot, until she pulled him down and kissed him, rocking her hips, setting the pace, until he was moving with her, and all he could do was gasp her name.
Abby woke up with sunshine streaming through her window, illuminating the reddish highlights in Mark’s dark hair, a wedge of golden skin on his cheek （and a gigantic dust bunny that Abby quickly kicked under the bed）。 Lying beside him, she’d felt blanketed in an unfamiliar contentment, an unassailable sense of rightness.